“Ah, Esther,” he said, wrapping his hand around my wrist. He held it to his chest and his eyes brimmed. “Du bist zu mir zurückgekommen, sie aber nicht. Jetzt geh’nie weg von hier.”
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“You returned to him.” This was Nan from the door. She looked in with her hand on her stomach, the way it always was now. “The other one didn’t. Myrle, he means.” She stopped, raised her eyes to mine. “But you, he’s saying, you’ll never go away from here again.”
“I’ll be,” Patricia said. “He’s sicker than I thought.”
Never. The sound of it rung in my ears, no matter what Patricia said. Now she meant me when he said it, not the other girl, and that was something. Something grand. I thought of Myrle’s fingers through the crack in the door, how with a touch they’d almost burned. We’d stayed like that until the whistles from the factories went, far off. I’ll be back, I’d told her, I promise. And she’d only said, When? Myrle had never asked to come home. Those fingers of hers weren’t anything like I knew anymore. That’s what Chicago does to a girl, wringing you out until you become someone else. Maybe Myrle really was drowned, if that’s what she wanted, to sink deep in the place where she had Charlotte and Keyes and I had only pinpricks. Maybe that’s what the Elliot boy had done to her from the start.
And who was I to say any different?
Part V: The Birth of Norma Byrne
MYRLE
I
She was coming and I couldn’t stop her. I wasn’t about to try. I lay in the darkness of our room and didn’t make a sound. The pinch was sharp at my back, my stomach a stone. The air felt restless and no end to it, save it was hushed like the inside of a box. Already I could imagine the curl of her hand in mine, her fingernails that would need trimming, and a thread of hair on her crown. A new little girl, just like that. As if I had done something to deserve her, and I wished I had.
“Charlotte,” I called. She woke on the pillow next to me with those springs of hair in her eyes. When the light shone through the windows, I felt another one, sharper this time, with a twist in my insides. Charlotte took my hand.
We waited until the sun rose higher on the windows, the pains faster and the sheets hot to the touch. In the chair next to me, Charlotte worried herself into silence. By the door, Mrs. Keyes had abandoned the knitting in her lap. “At least it’s a Sunday,” she sighed. “We won’t have those factories blaring at us.” The alley outside was quiet as a church, the house too, the other girls still asleep. If it hadn’t been for babies, I might have thought the three of us the last in the good wide world. If we spoke, something terrible would surely come of it. When the door finally opened, Mrs. Keyes dropped her head. “Thank heaven,” she said and crossed herself. “The woman’s here. We’ll survive the day.”
“Hold on, dearie,” the midwife said as she bustled in. She was a small woman with a graying bun and round cheeks, but her hands were frighteningly quick. She dropped her bag and tapped Mrs. Keyes on the shoulder. “Get two bowls of hot water and a knife. Plenty of towels. And be sure that water’s clean. The knife with it.” Hurrying out, Mrs. Keyes opened her mouth as if she might cry. The woman winked at Charlotte and touched her hands to my stomach. “Nice and low,” she crooned. “You shouldn’t be much time at all.” She washed at the sink and sat at the foot of the bed, pressing open my knees. “You’ll feel my hand.”
I winced.
The woman whistled. “She’s upside down, that’s the trouble. I’ll have to turn her.” She cocked her head. “You’re a young one, aren’t you? But that will be all right. Young ones have strength more than the old mothers. You might just have to bite your tongue a bit.”
I knotted the sheet between my fingers. Charlotte sat with me on the bed, the bed far too narrow now and stiff at my back. When Mrs. Keyes returned, the other girls were awake in the hall, crowding together with their whispers. “You leave her alone, you hear me,” Mrs. Keyes scolded them. “Myrle’s got enough problems without you bumbling about.” She fastened the lock and checked it twice.
“Here we go.” The midwife reached under the sheet. “You try telling her to come out. Think on that.” Charlotte’s face shone. “Go on, Myrle,” she said. “You yell all you want.” But I couldn’t catch my breath. The bed felt higher, the light from the windows streaming, and a pain tore through my insides to the back of my throat. “She’s a mischief,” the midwife swore, shaking her head. I wondered if telling her to come would do any good. What had Mother said? It’s a fine thing to be born, but it’s none too comfortable. Fine things go like that. But what did Mother know of comfort or finer things, when dirt clung to our house and even our gaslights left their smoky stains. I could see them flickering, high on the wall, and a flood of heat rushed between my legs. The midwife stood back. “My goodness,” Mrs. Keyes said. There she was, my little girl. She was blood-thin and purple, a helpless bundle on a sheet. The midwife slapped her stomach and she cried out. “That’s right.” The midwife smiled. “Mrs. Keyes, you take her. We have some doing here.” The woman drew out a needle and thread and a blackened bottle of whisky from her bag.
“Myrle, she’s here,” Charlotte said. “Look who she is.”
“The lungs of an ox, I should say.” Mrs. Keyes held the baby close so I could see her all at once. Her eyes were full, her hair pale as thistles.
“What should we call her?” Charlotte asked. “Helen?”
“Or Ruth,” Mrs. Keyes said.
“What about Rose?” Charlotte asked.
“That’s not a name,” Mrs. Keyes said. “That’s a flower. This one’s a bona fide girl.”
They waited for me, but I couldn’t think. All the names I had imagined before, now they seemed less.
“You’ll feel this one,” the midwife said. A sharp prick and the light from the windows was high and white and flooded the place. I heard a wail, as clear as a bird and rising — the girl was a beauty with her noise. “Greta, that’s a name for her,” I said, letting my eyes close. “After Mother. Even Esther would like that.” “Watch her now. She’s going,” the midwife called. “Myrle?” Charlotte asked. But it was the noise I wanted. It faded off now into the far corner of the room and the room with it — a noise I knew as well as my mother’s voice, and I had always known it. There’s more to you than they think, Mother had said. Just looking at you, I can see it. Ten, twenty years to come. Just you wait.
Twenty years, Mother said. But it took longer than she could have guessed. I remember sleeping on Agnes’ porch with my sisters in the summertime, hours after the house had gone to bed. Through the screens, the cicadas hummed—zikaden, Mother called them. They sang the most when we were milking, at the end of the day and in the early mornings before we started our chores. Once we finished them, Mother would walk us to the river. “Look,” she’d say, plucking a cicada off a leaf. She cupped it in her hand. They were ugly things — bright with circles of green, yellow, and black. Agnes stepped away and Esther made a face, but Mother curled her fingers around the insect as if something precious. “These nest only a few winters,” she said. “But others burrow underground for more than seventeen years. When they come out, they are everywhere underfoot. And the way they sing, you can’t hear your own voice. But after a few months, they are gone again. They leave only their shells.” Mother waved her hand one way and another to show us. “Shells on every tree trunk and fence post.” She blew on the cicada’s back and it drew out its wings. Like glass, those wings — veined and thin, and the cicada didn’t look so ugly then. I asked Mother if I could hold it, and she let it walk into my hand. When I tried the sound zikaden on my tongue, the creature thrummed against my skin. I blew on it the way Mother had done, its wings spreading. “Can you imagine?” Mother said. “After seventeen years, the world would be a very different place.”